Pelican currently runs best on Python 2.7.x; earlier versions of Python are not
supported. There is provisional support for Python 3.2 and higher, although
there may be rough edges, particularly with regards to optional 3rd-party
components.

You can install Pelican via several different methods. The simplest is via
pip:

$ pip install pelican

If you don’t have pip installed, an alternative method is
easy_install:

$ easy_install pelican

(Keep in mind that operating systems will often require you to prefix the above
commands with sudo in order to install Pelican system-wide.)

While the above is the simplest method, the recommended approach is to create
a virtual environment for Pelican via virtualenv before installing Pelican.
Assuming you have virtualenv installed, you can then open a new terminal
session and create a new virtual environment for Pelican:

Once the virtual environment has been created and activated, Pelican can be
be installed via pipinstallpelican as noted above. Alternatively, if
you have the project source, you can install Pelican using the distutils
method:

$ cd path-to-Pelican-source
$ python setup.py install

If you have Git installed and prefer to install the latest bleeding-edge
version of Pelican rather than a stable release, use the following command:

$ pip install -e git://github.com/getpelican/pelican#egg=pelican

If you plan on using Markdown as a markup format, you’ll need to install the
Markdown library as well:

$ pip install Markdown

If you want to use AsciiDoc you need to install it from source or use your operating
system’s package manager.

Once Pelican is installed, you can use it to convert your Markdown or reST
content into HTML via the pelican command, specifying the path to your
content and (optionally) the path to your settings file:

$ pelican /path/to/your/content/ [-s path/to/your/settings.py]

The above command will generate your site and save it in the output/
folder, using the default theme to produce a simple site. The default theme
consists of very simple HTML without styling and is provided so folks may use
it as a basis for creating their own themes.

You can also tell Pelican to watch for your modifications, instead of
manually re-running it every time you want to see your changes. To enable this,
run the pelican command with the -r or --autoreload option.

Pelican has other command-line switches available. Have a look at the help to
see all the options you can use:

$ pelican --help

Continue reading below for more detail, and check out the Pelican wiki’s
Tutorials page for
links to community-published tutorials.

Once Pelican has been installed, you can create a skeleton project via the
pelican-quickstart command, which begins by asking some questions about
your site:

$ pelican-quickstart

Once you finish answering all the questions, your project will consist of the
following hierarchy (except for “pages”, which you can optionally add yourself
if you plan to create non-chronological content):

The next step is to begin to adding content to the content folder that has
been created for you. (See Writing articles using Pelican section below for
more information about how to format your content.)

Once you have written some content to generate, you can use the pelican
command to generate your site, which will be placed in the output folder.
Alternatively, you can use automation tools that “wrap” the pelican command
to simplify the process of generating, previewing, and uploading your site. One
such tool is the Makefile that’s automatically created for you when you use
pelican-quickstart to create a skeleton project. To use make to
generate your site, run:

$ make html

If you’d prefer to have Pelican automatically regenerate your site every time a
change is detected (which is handy when testing locally), use the following
command instead:

Normally you would need to run makeregenerate and makeserve in two
separate terminal sessions, but you can run both at once via:

$ make devserver

The above command will simultaneously run Pelican in regeneration mode as well
as serve the output at http://localhost:8000. Once you are done testing your
changes, you should stop the development server via:

$ ./develop_server.sh stop

When you’re ready to publish your site, you can upload it via the method(s) you
chose during the pelican-quickstart questionnaire. For this example, we’ll
use rsync over ssh:

Pelican tries to be smart enough to get the information it needs from the
file system (for instance, about the category of your articles), but some
information you need to provide in the form of metadata inside your files.

If you are writing your content in reStructuredText format, you can provide
this metadata in text files via the following syntax (give your file the
.rst extension):

Pelican implements an extension to reStructuredText to enable support for the
abbr HTML tag. To use it, write something like this in your post:

This will be turned into :abbr:`HTML (HyperText Markup Language)`.

You can also use Markdown syntax (with a file ending in .md,
.markdown, .mkd, or .mdown). Markdown generation requires that you
first explicitly install the Markdown package, which can be done via pipinstallMarkdown. Metadata syntax for Markdown posts should follow this
pattern:

Pelican can also process HTML files ending in .html and .htm. Pelican
interprets the HTML in a very straightforward manner, reading metadata from
meta tags, the title from the title tag, and the body out from the
body tag:

With HTML, there is one simple exception to the standard metadata: tags can
be specified either via the tags metadata, as is standard in Pelican, or
via the keywords metadata, as is standard in HTML. The two can be used
interchangeably.

Note that, aside from the title, none of this article metadata is mandatory:
if the date is not specified and DEFAULT_DATE is set to fs, Pelican
will rely on the file’s “mtime” timestamp, and the category can be determined
by the directory in which the file resides. For example, a file located at
python/foobar/myfoobar.rst will have a category of foobar. If you would
like to organize your files in other ways where the name of the subfolder would
not be a good category name, you can set the setting USE_FOLDER_AS_CATEGORY
to False.

If you do not explicitly specify summary metadata for a given post, the
SUMMARY_MAX_LENGTH setting can be used to specify how many words from the
beginning of an article are used as the summary.

You can also extract any metadata from the filename through a regular
expression to be set in the FILENAME_METADATA setting. All named groups
that are matched will be set in the metadata object. The default value for the
FILENAME_METADATA setting will only extract the date from the filename. For
example, if you would like to extract both the date and the slug, you could set
something like: '(?P<date>\d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2})_(?P<slug>.*)'

Please note that the metadata available inside your files takes precedence over
the metadata extracted from the filename.

If you create a folder named pages inside the content folder, all the
files in it will be used to generate static pages, such as About or
Contact pages. (See example filesystem layout below.)

You can use the DISPLAY_PAGES_ON_MENU setting to control whether all those
pages are displayed in the primary navigation menu. (Default is True.)

If you want to exclude any pages from being linked to or listed in the menu
then add a status:hidden attribute to its metadata. This is useful for
things like making error pages that fit the generated theme of your site.

From Pelican 3.1 onwards, it is now possible to specify intra-site links to
files in the source content hierarchy instead of files in the generated
hierarchy. This makes it easier to link from the current post to other posts
and images that may be sitting alongside the current post (instead of having
to determine where those resources will be placed after site generation).

To link to internal content (files in the content directory), use the
following syntax: |filename|path/to/file:

Embedding non-article or non-page content is slightly different in that the
directories need to be specified in pelicanconf.py file. The images
directory is configured for this by default but others will need to be added
manually:

content
├── images
│ └── han.jpg
└── misc
└── image-test.md

And image-test.md would include:

![Alt Text](|filename|/images/han.jpg)

Any content can be linked in this way. What happens is that the images
directory gets copied to output/static/ upon publishing. This is
because images is in the settings["STATIC_PATHS"] list by default. If
you want to have another directory, say pdfs you would need to add the
following to pelicanconf.py:

It is possible to translate articles. To do so, you need to add a lang meta
attribute to your articles/pages and set a DEFAULT_LANG setting (which is
English [en] by default). With those settings in place, only articles with the
default language will be listed, and each article will be accompanied by a list
of available translations for that article.

Pelican uses the article’s URL “slug” to determine if two or more articles are
translations of one another. The slug can be set manually in the file’s
metadata; if not set explicitly, Pelican will auto-generate the slug from the
title of the article.

Here is an example of two articles, one in English and the other in French.

Post content quality notwithstanding, you can see that only item in common
between the two articles is the slug, which is functioning here as an
identifier. If you’d rather not explicitly define the slug this way, you must
then instead ensure that the translated article titles are identical, since the
slug will be auto-generated from the article title.

If you do not want the original version of one specific article to be detected
by the DEFAULT_LANG setting, use the translation metadata to specify
which posts are translations:

If you want to publish an article as a draft (for friends to review before
publishing, for example), you can add a status:draft attribute to its
metadata. That article will then be output to the drafts folder and not
listed on the index page nor on any category page.